Transform Boring Content into a Fun Drag-and-Drop

This is the second part of a three-article series about how you can turn one piece of boring content into three completely different types of interactions. You can check out part one here.

We’ve all been there before: your boss sends you a fifty-slide deck of content that is absolutely loaded with bullet points, long paragraphs of text, and not much else. You might have wondered: how can I turn this boring, static text content into something fun and engaging? Here’s an example of the kind of content we typically see:

Here are the three steps I followed to transform this content from static to dynamic:

Make the Learner Think

Instead of just passively presenting the seven steps of selling to the learner, as in the “Before” slides, I wanted to make the learner think about the selling process and make them identify the correct order of the steps by themselves. So, rather than giving them the information, I asked them to piece it together.

Keep in mind that if you’re going to present information or material in the form of an activity, that activity should NOT be graded. It’s not fair to quiz learners on content they haven’t seen yet—so in this case, the learning is exploratory and not graded. They can take their time and have as many attempts as they need to get the steps placed in the right order.

Deliver Bite-Size Pieces of Content

Once the learner has correctly identified the order of the seven steps of selling, they have a chance to click on each step to view the information related to that step. This way, the information is broken up into more manageable pieces. The learner isn’t overwhelmed with tons of paragraphs of text all at once; instead, they can seek one small piece of content at a time.

Give Learners Control

In this activity, the learners not only have to drag and drop the steps into the right order, but they also have to click to view each of the seven steps and related information. They also have the ability to view the information in any order they want. All of these changes to the content provide the learner with more control over their learning experience, which is more engaging than just having them read through paragraphs of text

This is just one of many ways you can transform text-filled slides into a fun and meaningful activity for your learners. How would you transform this content? Any ideas for other fun types of interaction that would work well for this process? Leave me your comments below and stay tuned for part three of this series to see how I transform the same content into a click-and-reveal interaction. And if you’re interested in downloading the template version of this drag-and-drop activity, it’s available here.

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Hi there! I'm having problems getting the incorrect box to fire in this template. The correct box fires fine, but not incorrect. I have 10 items and 2 boxes they are to be dragged on. 5 in each box. I was under the impression the Submit Interaction took care of this auto-magically, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Any hints as to what I'm doing wrong?